


Genovefa

by wisekrakens



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 07:24:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/897511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisekrakens/pseuds/wisekrakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find the glass-ceilinged ballroom on a mission through the city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genovefa

**Author's Note:**

  * For [popkin16](https://archiveofourown.org/users/popkin16/gifts).



> Rodney-centric ficlet because BIRTHDAY.

They find the glass-ceilinged ballroom on a mission through the city. Its floor is a sprawling fractal, simple and soothing, pieced together with wood from three trees Teyla can name and two she can’t. Around the edges runs a snippet from one of the Ancients’ epic poems that brings two of the more delicate anthropologists to tears when they’re called in to translate. Elizabeth’s translation is the one they use in the reports and the one they send back to the SGC; she sacrifices a little exactness in favor of preserving the spirit of the thing, and everyone, including the weeping anthropologists, agrees that it’s for the best.

The poem is called Mochan, and the quoted passage comes just before the hero’s climactic fight against the great three-headed snake monster Mathghamhain – but it’s actually Genovefa, the heroine, who says it.

_The stars, my friends, my only companions,_   
_Take me from this place. Take me to my home._   
_I am lost on this side of the great gulf,_   
_And I know not my place, nor where I may_   
_Rest my head, though it grows weary this night._   
_O stars above, give me guidance through this storm,_   
_That I might know peace on the other side._

In a week, the ballroom becomes a pilgrimage point. In a month, the dust starts crawling back over the floor polish. In six months, only Rodney’s footprints, sprinkled over the fractal inlays, remain.

  


Rodney could tell you why he likes the glass-ceilinged ballroom, but that would mean admitting it to himself. Instead, he says that it’s the only place he can hear himself think; he says that it’s the only place he can get away from the scientists hassling him; he says that it’s the only place he can actually get any work done.

Rodney doesn’t do any work in the ballroom. And if he does, it’s got nothing to do with power distribution.

Rodney comes to the ballroom to stare up at Pegasus’s constellations. Some times he names them ridiculous things – Big Mac, Little Mac, That Homicidal Tree On P5X-391. Sometimes he names them amazing things – Puddlejumper, Starburst, and Für Elise, because the star in the middle twinkles in time with his humming. The last little remnant of the boy who would open his window in the middle of the night and stare heavenwards smiles inside Rodney’s chest as he marks down his constellations.

Sometimes Rodney comes to the ballroom when the stars aren’t out to greet him. He does do work, then, but it’s sanity-work; it’s grabbing hold of the threads of reality and pulling; it’s coaxing the laws of the universe into the framework of numbers and variables and mathematical operations. It’s theory for theory’s sake, beyond the scope of even the equipment Atlantis has provided them, and it’s all for Rodney.

  


Once, Rodney comes to the glass-ceilinged ballroom after a bad, bad mission. All of the team but Rodney had been arrested by the city’s prince – and _prince_ , how medieval is that; all they’re missing is the black plague and women with rotting teeth – and Rodney, cut off from the gate by a phalanx of rough-looking men with flintlocks – flintlocks! – blows up an uninhabited warehouse, a partially inhabited guard house, and maybe-kinda half of the castle in the process of getting his team free.

Rodney is an engineer. He knew exactly what he was doing to the structural integrity of that castle. And if it happens to fall over sometime in the next few months, more’s the pity.

He doesn’t run to the glass-ceilinged ballroom; he has more dignity than that. He sits through the post-mission medical check and complains exactly as much as he’s expected to; he sits through the post-mission debrief and complains exactly as much as he’s expected to; he goes to dinner and complains exactly as much as he’s expected to. He doesn’t go to the glass-ceilinged ballroom until later that night, when he’s absolutely, entirely, one-hundred percent sure Teyla, Ronon, and John are dreaming about whatever Teyla, Ronon, and John usually dream about. The stars are waiting for him; heedless of the dust, he lies down in the middle of the floor in order to properly greet them.

It seems like a geographic age later that Rodney hears careful footsteps sounding behind him. He twists – not bothering to get up, because hah, right, with his back – and finds John, face half in shadow, looking like he might just turn around and leave instead of going through with it, and Rodney just doesn’t even care anymore. So he traces out Für Elise, and Starburst, and then Big Mac and Little Mac just to hear John’s donkey laugh. They’re side by side on the floor by the time Rodney’s eyes start to drift close; the last thing that happens, just before he falls all the way into sleep, is that John takes their hands and twines them together like they’re a pair of teenagers.

Rodney could tell you why he likes the glass-ceilinged ballroom, but that would mean admitting it to himself.


End file.
